Introduction

The show is just getting started, but we've already seen enough to give you
guys a bit of brief live coverage, as well as some information on what to expect
from the rest of the show.

Over the course of this week we will be bringing you even more live coverage,
including full reviews of some of the products being introduced at this year's
Computex. Among those are NVIDIA's Crush and AMD's 760MP chipset. So keep on
checking back throughout the week for more information on those technologies
and much more.

Politics at Computex 2001

One of the least fun, but sometimes most interesting, facets of this industry
is a lot of the political happenings that take place behind the scenes. While
we usually refrain from reporting on them, we were witness to something at Computex
that was worthy of sharing.

Much like last year's Computex, VIA has a very noticeable presence on the show
floor. While there aren't many new products from VIA this year, VIA's message
was present almost everywhere - mainly in the form of VIA DDR balloons above
various motherboard manufacturers' display booths.

However, at the request of Intel, many of the top tier motherboard manufacturers
promptly removed the VIA DDR balloons. In one situation, a VIA balloon was cut
loose and became stuck at the top of the convention hall while others were simply
pulled down.

Since we were present when all of this was going on we saw the almost immediate
transition from VIA DDR balloons to Intel Pentium 4 advertisements and promotional
material.

As far as both AMD and VIA have come in recent times, it is still quite obvious
that they still haven't reached the marketing muscle of Intel. While this situation
had no bearing on the actual products seen at Computex, it was an interesting
display of strong arming marketing tactics at their worst.